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KISS OR KILL
Rating:  ½
Australia. 1997.
Director/Screenplay – Bill Bennett, Producers – Bill Bennett & Jennifer Bennett, Photography – Malcolm McCulloch, Production Design – Andrew Plumer. Production Company – Bill Bennett Productions.
Cast:
Frances O’Connor (Nicole ‘Nick’ Davies), Matt Day (Al Fletcher), Chris Haywood (Hummer), Andrew S. Gilbert (Crean), Barry Langrishe (Zipper Doyle), Max Cullen (Stan), Barry Otto (Adler Jones), John Clarke (Possum Harry)
Plot: Nicole ‘Nick’ Davies meets a businessman in a bar and returns with him to his hotel room for sex. But she and her boyfriend Al Fletcher have really conducted a set-up and have spiked the man’s drink so that they can rob him while he is unconscious. However they discover that they have given him too much of the drug and that he is dead. In his briefcase they discover a videotape that shows top rugby player Zipper Doyle having sex with an underage boy. Nick rings Doyle and leaves a message on his answerphone, calling him a sick bastard and saying that they have the tape. They flee into the outback, pursued by Doyle and two police detectives investigating the dead body. But as they flee from place to place, someone is murdering the people they encounter and Al begins to wonder if the real killer might not be Nick.
This Australian thriller is a borderline genre entry. There are times near the beginning when Bill Bennett’s direction seems to be trying just little too much to be a trendy, nihilistic road movie – Kiss or Kill sort of plays like a less outré and less out-there version of the then-recent The Doom Generation (1995). But it is not long before the script hits in and absorbs one in its twists and turns. It is here that Bill Bennett holds one quite glued to the film. The array of elements – the couple on the run from a theft and blackmail plot gone wrong, the pursuing cops, the pursuing blackmailee and a mysterious psychopathic killer somewhere in the midst – are tautly wound in and around one another and with considerable skill. One’s attention is kept through deliberate ambiguity – does Nick kill while she sleepwalks or perhaps deliberately because of her disturbed past? Or did Al do the killings to cover up his thievery? Is the lawyer that comes to bail them out sent by Al’s father or by Zipper? Who did the right hand and left hand killings? The end of the film does leave several threads hanging – who for instance did the other-handed killing of the couple at the nuclear test site? Some of this is deliberate – there’s a twist in the ending that deliberately withholds explanations from the audience with rather haunting effect.
Also notable about Kiss or Kill is its laidback sense of humour, something that can be described as peculiarly Antipodean – a typical characterization is Max Cullen’s eccentric motelier, or the farmer who hides the key to the lock on his wire gate in the middle of nowhere underneath a nearby stone. The banter between pursuing detectives Chris Haywood and Andrew S. Gilbert is quite amusing. There is a marvellous scene where Gilbert enquires as to why Chris Haywood doesn’t eat bacon and Haywood answers it is because he is Jewish and then casually litters the subsequent conversation before an increasingly astonished Gilbert with reference to his parents being Mossad agents, about his wife and his handicapped children, before picking the bacon up and eating it.
Australian director Bill Bennett has made a number of other films, including the road movie comedy Spider and Rose (1994), the World War II romantic drama In a Savage Land (1999) and the comedy The Nugget (2002), as well as a couple of ventures to Hollywood – the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy Two if by Sea (1996), probably his best known film, and the lesser-seen sexual thriller Tempted (2001).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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